Hey guys, time for another update on the work we have been doing over the last couple of weeks!

—

Art Progress

Michail has been experimenting a lot with the new biome, and has settled on something we are all pretty happy with. He has been trying to hit the sweet spot between using colours that are different enough from the existing biome, while not going too dark, as it will make the character models harder to read. He has used a lot of greens and greys to give the ‘cold, rocky mountain’ vibe, and some blue, icy touches here and there to add some more colour.

—

Map Additions

With the new biome just about ready, I have started to add a new section to the map. At the moment is it still just a messy mark out, but over the next few weeks I am going to do a few more sessions adding more assets. What you can see currently is all the rocky outcrops marked out (the black), the areas where I plan to put key points like resources and mob camps (the stars) and the areas that will be the primary routes players take through the zone. It will all get a lot clearer soon.

—

SyndCon

From the 27th to 31st of August, members and friends of The Syndicate got together to play games, socialise, and to raise money for charity at Syndcon. The Syndicate are a gaming community who have been testing with us longer than any other, and it is awesome they get together in this way outside of gaming online. We also contributed a printed piece of Michail’s concept art to the charity raffle, and I have been told that they managed to raise more than any previous year! So we are really happy that we could support such a good cause, and it is great we have such a good bunch of people as part of our larger community.

—

Streams

We had another stream last week, and rather than focus on development for this one, we decided to just hang out and play some Smite! There wasn’t a whole lot that we wanted to show off or discus development wise, and we thought it would be good to just have a more social event. Considering some of us had never played, and the others hadn’t played in a good few years, we did okay! Was good fun either way, and we will be streaming another gaming session in about a week. Make sure you follow the stream while you are there, we will be streaming a lot when 24/7 server arrive!

—

Brainstorming

I have been posting a fair bit of content to the forums recently, mainly things that I have been brainstorming. There is a thread on the naming of special resources, and I have just posted a new one on the naming of our servers. I would love to hear what people think of my ideas! I also posted the results of our most recent survey, which aimed to find out how we could improve our playtests. I am going to make sure to keep posting things that I am working on, so drop in if you feel like giving me some feedback.

—

That is about it for this 2 week period. We are obviously still very busy working on features for our move to 24/7 servers, but I will have news of those in a later blog when they are a bit more polished.